Category: Asia

On June 4th and 5th, 1989, the Chinese government violently put down the pro-liberty Tiananmen Square student protest. One man stood alone against a column of tanks, and for his extraordinary heroism became known as “Tank Man,” though nothing more is known about his identity. Some say he was arrested and killed, others that he is still in prison in China, and still others that he is alive and in hiding. Regardless, he has become a symbol for resistance against tyranny.

Tank Man is a powerful short film (15 min.) dramatizing events leading up to his moment of extraordinary courage. He is little known in China, where all images of him have been erased and all mention of him banned. This film does him some small justice.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (2330.TW), the biggest contract chipmaker, said it plans to build a $12 billion factory in Arizona in an apparent win for the Trump administration’s efforts to wrestle global tech supply chains back from China.

The plan, which will create over 1,600 jobs, comes as U.S. President Donald Trump steps up criticism of Chinese trade practices and Beijing’s handling of the novel coronavirus ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential election.

Trump has long pledged to bring manufacturing back from overseas and now a steep economic slump brought on by the coronavirus is driving a government-wide push to end U.S. production and supply chain dependency on China.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross touted the deal as “another indication that President Trump’s policy agenda has led to a renaissance in American manufacturing.”

TSMC is a major supplier to U.S. tech giants such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O), as well as Chinese firms like Huawei Technologies [HWT.UL], which Washington has put on a trade blacklist.

“This project is of critical, strategic importance to a vibrant and competitive U.S. semiconductor ecosystem that enables leading U.S. companies to fabricate their cutting-edge semiconductor products within the United States,” TSMC said.

The Chinese Communist Party has threatened that American politicians seeking to hold China accountable for the coronavirus pandemic will face “severe consequences,” including targeted economic sanctions. An article in the Communist Party’s propaganda outlet, the Global Times, names many Republicans by name, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.), along with Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas). It also names the attorneys general of Missouri and Mississippi, the two states that filed lawsuits against China.

“Republicans who have been groundlessly accusing China and inflaming the ‘holding China accountable’ political farce will face severe consequences, sources said, noting that the aftermath will also impact the upcoming November elections, while business and trade between Missouri and China will be further soured,” the Global Times reported.

“China is extremely dissatisfied with the abuse of litigation by the US against China over the COVID-19 epidemic, and is considering punitive countermeasures against US individuals, entities and state officials, such as Missouri’s attorney general Eric Schmitt, who filed a lawsuit against China, seeking compensation for the coronavirus pandemic, sources close to the matter told the Global Times exclusively,” the paper added. “At least four US Congress members, including Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, and two entities will be put on China’s sanctions list, analysts said.”

Banks, perhaps a lesser-known name on the Chinese Communist Party’s target list, led twenty-one of his fellow Republicans in sending a letter to Attorney General William Barr, demanding the U.S. bring a case against China in the International Court of Justice. He was the first lawmaker to suggest China should pay reparations for the fallout from the coronavirus crisis and he introduced a resolution making it clear that the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the pandemic.

He said he considers China’s threat against him a “badge of honor.”

“The Chinese government is lashing out at those in the U.S. who are appropriately trying to hold them accountable for intentionally misleading us about the nature of the novel coronavirus, where it was spreading and how quickly things were getting out of control. I consider their threats a badge of honor,” Banks said in a statement on Thursday.

As my PJ colleague Tyler O’Neil noted earlier today, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has introduced the Democrats’ next package they bill as coronavirus relief. As has been the case in the previous bills, this one treats the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to fund the Democrats’ partisan priorities. Genies continue jumping out of Christmas trees every time Democrats write up another of these bills.

They’ve also prioritized China’s economy in this one. The bill includes a provision that waives Chapter 83 of title 41, United States Code. What’s that?

Chapter 83 of title 41, United States Code, shall not apply with respect to purchases made in response to the emergency declared by the President on March 13, 2020, under section 501 of the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 5191) and under any subsequent major disaster declaration under section 401 of such Act that supersedes such emergency declaration.

Chapter 83 of Title 41, United States Code is none other than the Buy American Act. That 1933 law prioritizes American manufacturers over others when the government makes purchases. The Trump administration strengthened the Buy American act last year. The Democrats’ bill would waive it permanently, allowing the government to purchase more goods from overseas, unrestricted.

Advantage: China, the world’s manufacturing hub. Disadvantage: Americans who want to work making things.

Cinco De Mayo When in 1861 Mexico declared a temporary moratorium on the repayment of foreign debts, English, Spanish, and French troops invaded the country. By April 1862 the English and Spanish had withdrawn, but the French, with the support of wealthy landowners, remained in an attempt to establish a monarchy under Maximilian of Austria and to curb U.S. power in North America.1862, a poorly equipped mestizo and Zapotec force under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza defeated French troops at the Battle of Puebla, southeast of Mexico City; about 1,000 French troops were killed. Although the fighting continued and the French were not driven out for another five years, the victory at Puebla became a symbol of Mexican resistance to foreign domination. The city, which was later renamed Puebla de Zaragoza, is the site of a museum devoted to the battle, and the battlefield itself is maintained as a park.

1994 Singapore canes American Michael Fay for vandalism, a day after the sentence was reduced from six lashes to four in response to an appeal by President Bill Clinton. [I didn’t think it was that long ago. How time slips away]

Fox, Reuters and The New York Post are among the major media outlets to report that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is currently in a vegetative state.

Reuters reported earlier today that Beijing has sent a group of Chinese medical experts to Pyongyang to consult with his doctors. “According to the agency citing three sources with knowledge on the matter, the team took off to the hermit state on Thursday.”

Japanese magazine Shukan Gendai reports that earlier in April, Kim was visiting a rural area when he clutched his chest and collapsed suddenly. Fox has not been able to confirm this report.

Jong Un reportedly required a stent procedure — a surgery that involves a tube placed into a congested blood vessel to ensure the blood circulation can continue.

While the procedure in question is not too complex, the magazine’s source said, the surgeon was not used to dealing with patients with obesity and was too nervous during the operation, resulting in a delay which left Kim Jong Un in a “vegetative state.”

On Monday, CNNreported that U.S. Intelligence officials were monitoring reports that Kim was “gravely ill” following a cardiovascular surgery. Their source was a U.S. intelligence official with “direct knowledge.” CNN had spoken with a second US official who had said the “concerns were credible but the severity is hard to assess.”

Six U.S. military vessels were conducting training operations in international waters last week when 11 Iranian ships “crossed the bows and sterns of the U.S. vessels at extremely close range and high speeds,” according to the April 15 U.S. Navy statement.

At one point, the Iranian ships came within 10 yards of the Coast Guard cutter Maui’s bow.

Friday on Fox News, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) discussed the possibility of a link to the global coronavirus outbreak and a Chinese lab and the possibility China’s government may have tried to cover up the outbreak domestically.

Cotton told “Fox & Friends” that if the allegations were true about China, it would be historic on a global level.

After receiving emails from the Chinese consulate asking him to pass a resolution praising China for its fight against the coronavirus, which originated in China, Wisconsin Senate President Roger Roth (R-Appleton) wrote a resolution slamming China for lying about the coronavirus.

“When [Roth] received the first one dated Feb. 26, he saw it was from a hotmail account and disregarded it as a prank,” the Wisconsin Examiner reported. “Then on March 10, 2020, he received a follow up, and Roth says he had his staff start digging, reaching out through government channels. They were able to confirm that the email requests were legitimate — and they were told Chinese diplomats routinely use private email accounts because they are faster.”

The Chinese sent Roth a draft of the resolution that they wanted him to use which was full of communist propaganda and said, “there is no need to overreact.”

Whereas China’s action has been critical to the global fight against the epidemic, and China has adopted unprecedented and rigorous measures for disease control and prevention, including locking down Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people, house-to-house temperature checks, postponing the return to work after the Lunar New Year break of hundreds of millions of travelers, construction of hospitals of more than two thousand beds on green fields within days, bringing in medical teams from across the country to Hubei Province. These measures have been effective in curbing the virus from spreading to other parts of China and the world. As a result, the daily number of newly confirmed cases in China has dropped sharply to double digits, over 60,000 (to be updated) people have been cured and discharged from hospital, and the case fatality rate has remained lower than SARS, EBOLA and MERS; and

Whereas China has been transparent and quick in sharing key information of the virus with the WHO and the international community, thus creating a window of opportunity for other countries to make timely response

“Then I got mad, because that’s when [COVID-19] cases started cropping up here and you saw the problem exacerbated as we started to learn the truth,” Roth told the Wisconsin Examiner. “I just sent them back a one-word response. I said ‘nuts.’”

“Then a couple of days later I said that we are going to introduce a resolution, it’s just not the one that the Chinese government wants,” Roth continued. “We’re going to introduce one that speaks the truth to the lies that I believe are being told around the world, so that’s how we ended up with the resolution as it was introduced.”

Roth put together the following resolution, in response to the request from the Chinese consulate, condemning China for its actions during the pandemic and for other acts of tyranny [emphasis original]:

Relating to: acknowledging that the Communist Party of China deliberately andintentionally misled the world on the Wuhan Coronavirus and standing insolidarity with the Chinese people to condemn the actions of the CommunistParty of China.

Whereas, the State of Wisconsin is currently in a state of emergency due to therising spread of the Coronavirus that originated in the Wuhan Province of China, asthe number of infected individuals in Wisconsin rose to over 700 and also consistedof 8 deaths as of March 26, 2020; and

Whereas, the Chinese people are a great people, and heirs to one of the greatestcivilizations in human history, held hostage by a brutal and oppressive regime thesepast 70 years; and

Whereas, the Communist Party of China has engaged in a continued patternof human and natural rights abuses perpetrated by the country’s communistadministration, including the Communist Party’s treatment of Tibet, the internmentand “reeducation” of 1.5 million Muslim Uyghurs in concentration camps, theenactment of a one-child policy responsible for aborting hundreds of millions ofchildren, the majority of them female, a record of organ harvesting and forcedsterilization, crackdown on the Tiananmen protests, and restrictions on individualexpression and religious practice; and

Whereas, the Communist Party of China has repeatedly demonstrated a lackof interest in respecting international norms, including a history of currencymanipulation, intellectual property theft, and restricting Chinese market access,while receiving the condemnation of numerous American Presidents and Legislatorsfrom both political parties for these practices; and

Whereas, the Communist Party of China, led by President Xi Jinping, hasmoved to consolidate power, scrapping term limits to create a de facto life term forthe President of China and continually squashing democratic-based initiatives inand outside of mainland China; and

Whereas, the Chinese government is currently engaging in a barrage ofmisinformation throughout all corners of the globe, attempting to pass off theresponsibility of their negligent and reckless response to the virus; and

Whereas, the Chinese government has imprisoned their own citizens whodared disseminate accurate information on the Coronavirus, destroyed earlysamples of the virus, refused to release timely and accurate information on the virus,and continued to allow infected individuals to leave the Wuhan Province afterreasonable evidence of person-to-person contamination was present; and

Whereas, reports have indicated that had the Chinese Government acted in amore efficient, transparent, and responsible way, cases worldwide of the virus mayhave been limited by 95 percent; and

Whereas, on February 5, 2020, the first confirmed case of Coronavirus wasidentified in Wisconsin; and

Whereas, on February 26, 2020, and again on March 10, 2020, the ChineseConsulate reached out to the Wisconsin Senate President requesting that the Senatepass a resolution — written by the Chinese Consulate — including propagandaand falsehoods such as:

“China has been transparent and quick in sharing key information of thevirus with the WHO and the international community, thus creating a window ofopportunity for other countries to make timely response”

Whereas, the Wisconsin State Senate deems it necessary and prudent tocombat the spread of misinformation propagated by the Communist Party of Chinaand the need to push back on the claims that the virus originated anywhere butChina; now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the senate, That the Wisconsin Senate acknowledges that theCommunist Party of China has deliberately and intentionally misled the world,suppressed vital information on the statistics and spread of the Wuhan Coronavirusboth domestically and abroad, allowed millions of individuals to travel outside of theprovince and country despite clear warnings that the virus could be transmittedperson-to-person, and engaged in active suppression and persecution of individualslooking to truthfully discuss information related to the Coronavirus, which has ledto a global pandemic the likes of which has not been seen for generations; and, be itfurther

Resolved, That the Wisconsin Senate hereby stands in solidarity with theChinese people, condemning the actions of the Communist Party of China in thestrongest possible terms, and acknowledges that millions, both in China and aroundthe world, are at risk of illness and death due to the negligence and hostile actionsof the Chinese Communist Party.

India, the world’s main supplier of generic drugs, said on Tuesday it will allow limited exports of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine that U.S. President Donald Trump has touted as a potential weapon in the fight against the coronavirus.

The Indian government had put a hold on exports of hydroxychloroquine as well as on the pain reliever, paracetamol, saying stocks were depleting because of the hit to global supply chains after the coronavirus emerged in China late last year.

But Trump spoke to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the weekend seeking supplies and on Monday said India may face retaliation if it didn’t withdraw the ban on exports.

India’s neighbours, including Nepal, have also sought the anti-malaria drug.

“It has been decided that India would licence paracetamol and HCQ in appropriate quantities to all our neighbouring countries who are dependent on our capabilities,” said Indian foreign ministry spokesman Anurag Srivastava.

“We will also be supplying these essential drugs to some nations who have been particularly badly affected by the pandemic,” he said.

When a new coronavirus emerged in China and began spreading around the world, including in the United States, President Donald Trump’s many critics in the American foreign-policy establishment were quick to identify him as part of the problem. Trump had campaigned on an “America first” foreign policy, which after his victory was enshrined in the official National Security Strategy that his administration published in 2017. At the time, I served in the administration and orchestrated the writing of that document. In the years since, Trump has been criticized for supposedly overturning the post–World War II order and rejecting the role the United States has long played in the world. Amid a global pandemic, he’s being accused—on this site and elsewhere—of alienating allies, undercutting multinational cooperation, and causing America to fight the coronavirus alone.

And yet even as the current emergency has proved him right in fundamental ways—about China specifically and foreign policy more generally—many respectable people in the United States are letting their disdain for the president blind them to what is really going on in the world.

Far from discrediting Trump’s point of view, the COVID-19 crisis reveals what his strategy asserted: that the world is a competitive arena in which great power rivals like China seek advantage, that the state remains the irreplaceable agent of international power and effective action, that international institutions have limited capacity to transform the behavior and preferences of states.

China, America’s most powerful rival, has played a particularly harmful role in the current crisis, which began on its soil. Initially, that country’s lack of transparency prevented prompt action that might have contained the virus. In Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, Chinese officials initially punished citizens for “spreading rumors” about the disease. The lab in Shanghai that first published the genome of the virus on open platforms was shut down the next day for “rectification,” as the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported in February. Apparently at the behest of officials at the Wuhan health commission, news reports indicate, visiting teams of experts from elsewhere in China were prevented from speaking freely to doctors in the infectious-disease wards. Some experts had suspected human-to-human transmission, but their inquiries were rebuffed. “They didn’t tell us the truth,” one team member said of the local authorities, “and from what we now know of the real situation then, they were lying” to us.

Now China’s propagandists are competing to create a narrative that obscures the origins of the crisis and that blames the United States for the virus. This irresponsible behavior and lack of transparency revealed what Trump’s National Security Strategy had identified early on: that “contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of others.” Instead of becoming a “responsible stakeholder”—a term George W. Bush’s administration used to describe the role it hoped Beijing would play following China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001—the Chinese Communist Party used the advantages of WTO membership to advance a political and economic system at odds with America’s free and open society. Previous National Security Strategy documents had tiptoed around China’s adversarial conduct, as if calling out that country as a competitor—as the 2017 document unequivocally did—was somehow impolite.

Day by day, the extent of the Chinese government’s crime against the world grows.

Whether the coronavirus ravaging the world started in a wet market or a Wuhan lab, the Chinese government early on deceived the world, silenced Chinese citizens who tried to warn the world, and have lied ever since.

Remember, Dr. Deborah Birx explained that one of the reasons U.S. health experts did not expect this pandemic is that we were not given complete data by China:

Pandemic expert Dr. Deborah Birx says U.S. officials initially responded to the coronavirus outbreak the way that they did because they thought it was going to be "more like SARS" and not a "global pandemic" *BECAUSE* "we were missing a significant amount of the data" from China pic.twitter.com/yFkzqqDBHh

You know who did see the emerging threat? Tucker Carlson and Sen. Tom Cotton, two people maliciously attacked by the media and Democrats:

Tucker Carlson: “Why am I watching impeachment coverage all day?”

Sen. Tom Cotton: “I suspect that months from now or perhaps even years from now when people look back at this time, coronavirus will be considered the bigger story than impeachment.”

Flashback to Jan 28th:• @TuckerCarlson: “Why am I watching impeachment coverage all day?"• @SenTomCotton: "I suspect that months from now or perhaps even years from now when people look back at this time, coronavirus will be considered the bigger story than impeachment.” pic.twitter.com/yxPBrVQ9iV

Now the mainstream media finally is being forced to acknowledge the massive Chinese deception, and the implications. The Washington Post reports:

The coronavirus pandemic ravaging the globe officially claimed 2,563 lives in Wuhan, where it began in a market that sold exotic animals for consumption. But evidence emerging from the city as it stirs from its two-month hibernation suggests the real death toll is exponentially higher.

Long lines have been forming at funeral homes in Wuhan over the past two weeks, as family members have been informed they may collect their loved ones’ remains ahead of Tomb-Sweeping Day. Some waited six hours to collect an urn, then the ashes.
The Hankou Funeral Parlor’s crematorium was operating 19 hours a day, with male staff enlisted to help carry bodies. In just two days, the home received 5,000 urns, the respected magazine Caixin reported.

Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.

With this deception in mind, Trump’s decision on January 31 to shut down travel from China was prophetic, and against general advice…………..

Just an aside. If you’ll watch yesterday’s Whitehouse briefing, you’ll notice that the modeling graphics used by both Drs. Fauci & Brix only used historical data from Italy. None – notany – from China.

I wonder if it’s finally dawning on people that trusting anything Chinese Communist goes past uncritical, straight to stupidly gullible.

As for America’s lame stream media, just consider them nothing more than propaganda organs for their political masters.

Perhaps the most important moment of Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus crisis briefing yesterday came not from Trump but from Dr. Deborah Birx. As in other briefings, reporters asked why the administration initially downplayed the potential severity of COVID-19. Birx made it very clear, albeit in a diplomatic fashion, that the official reports from China about the numbers and the spread in Wuhan and Hubei painted a picture of a very different disease.

“I think the medical community made — interpreted the Chinese data as this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” Birx explained, “because probably we were missing a significant amount of the data” from China

What data were we missing? The much-larger numbers on COVID-19 spread, for one. China insisted as late as mid-January (if not later) that they were not seeing any signs of “asymptomatic spread,” meaning that casual contact would not propagate the disease. This turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and China knew it. In fact, they were suppressing doctors who tried to warn the outside world of the wildfire spread of this coronavirus, and their initial success in tamping that information down led other countries — including the US — to assume this was a SARS variant with low risk for pandemic, as Birx explains.

A top Chinese health official said Wednesday that the government will begin counting coronavirus patients without symptoms in its official tally of cases of the virus, in what is a tacit acknowledgement that Beijing has underreported data on the pandemic.

China’s National Health Commission disclosed that the government is monitoring 1,541 people who have tested positive for coronavirus but have no symptoms.

Chang Jile, the head of the health agency, said at a press conference in Wuhan that the government will start reporting asymptomatic patient numbers Wednesday.

“From April 1, we will publish reports, outcomes and management of asymptomatic people in daily epidemic notifications, and respond to social concerns in a timely manner,” Jile said, according to CCTV.

Jile’s statement is the first time that the government has officially acknowledged that it has undercounted patients.

Yes, you read that correctly. Three months or more after China knew asymptomatic carriers were a problem, and at least a month since other countries learned that the hard way, Beijing now says they’ll start providing that data. It’s a little too late for that to do any good in terms of public policy, even if they start reporting that data honestly, which is far from certain even now. Had we known that data when China knew it and suppressed it, we might have been able to arrest the spread early and save thousands of lives, if not hundreds of thousands of lives.

And yet, as my friend Jeryl Bier points out at The Dispatch, the American media keep treating China’s data as both reliable and remarkable:

As the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 rises quickly in the United States and in many other countries around the world, the official number of new cases in China, the source of the pandemic, has fallen dramatically. Given the record of secrecy, duplicity, and coverup by the Communist government of China, there is little cause to take those official figures at anything close to face value. Nevertheless, Western media organizations, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations have taken to referring to China’s numbers as “confirmed cases” comparable to cases in other countries with more open societies and transparent governments, giving the impression that China has largely conquered the virus. …

Various media organizations have similarly relied on China’s numbers for some pretty dramatic headlines. On March 18, the New York Times declared: “China Hits a Coronavirus Milestone: No New Local Infections.” While the article notes in passing that Chinese “officials initially concealed and mismanaged the outbreak,” it goes on to flatly assert that “Beijing’s sledgehammer approach … worked to quickly lower the number of infections[.]” Axios headlined a similar report “No new coronavirus cases in Wuhan, China, where global pandemic began,” while NPR went with ”China Reports No New Domestic Cases, But Battles Coronavirus Imported From Abroad.”

Eight days later, the Times, again based on China’s “confirmed” numbers, told the world that, “The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases.” While the article says that “The Times is engaged in a comprehensive effort to track the details of every confirmed case in the United States, collecting information from federal, state and local officials,” apparently the Times applied considerably less rigor to acquire information on China.

On Monday, however, came news that China’s numbers have indeed been incomplete. The Wall Street Journal reported that “China said more than 1,500 people who were infected with the virus but haven’t shown symptoms weren’t included in its national tally of confirmed cases.”

That report finally prompted China’s rethink on reporting asymptomatic cases. Their track record right up to today should have everyone highly skeptical that they will suddenly discover honesty and transparency.

It was only a matter of time before the coronavirus pandemic started to show a rupture in Western relations with China. Today, the market got some of the first hints of a rising probability of “decoupling”.

Evidence came today in the form of two BBC reports, one of the U.K. government of Boris Johnson (who has COVID-19 now) saying there would be ramifications for China failing to share how they stopped the virus from spreading. One such punishment was getting rid of Huawei in their 5G program.

Over the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Johnson team doubted China’s SARS-CoV-2 infection count, which totals around 81,000, saying they were probably off by a factor of 40.

The wide spreading disease throughout Europe is turning people off to China in leadership positions who, only a few months ago, were fine with Beijing and thought the U.S. trade war with China was just Trump being Trump………

If you can’t trust a totalitarian government waging a ruthless propaganda war to tell the truth about the extent of the epidemic within its borders, who can you trust?

Add this to the growing pile of circumstantial evidence that China’s coronavirus problem isn’t as well in hand as they’d like the world to believe. They kicked out American reporters shortly before announcing that cases in Wuhan had dropped to zero, presumably to choke off the flow of accurate information about the true state of the spread. On the day that number was announced, reports to the contrary were already trickling out on social media:

On the very days when the national health authority was announcing that there were no new local infections, social media accounts in China were circulating photographs of “urgent notices” put up in residential areas announcing new cases and warning people to stay home.

EBC News, a Taiwan cable news network, broadcast two such photographs dated March 20, which is two days after China reported there were no new local Wuhan infections. One of the notices, after announcing the new cases, read: “Do not go out, or gather, wash your hands, be careful, hold on, hold on, and hold on some more.”

EBC also broadcast video of a hospital in Wuhan that it says was taken on March 19 and provided by a local Wuhan journalist. The video shows a reception area crowded with people, some of them on gurneys with IV drips, and health care workers in full protective gear, white suits, face masks and goggles.

Yesterday the Hollywood Reporter noted that more than 600 theaters across China were suddenly told to close after having recently reopened. Yesterday also brought news that some patients in Wuhan who had recovered from the disease and then tested negative later tested positive. Had they been re-infected by a different strain of COVID-19 or is China playing games with the numbers? NPR pointed out that Beijing doesn’t include those people in its official case count as “new” cases. Nor does it include asymptomatic carriers who test positive, potentially an enormous group. “Caixin, an independent Chinese news outlet, reported earlier this week that Wuhan hospitals were continuing to see new cases of asymptomatic virus carriers, citing a health official who said he had seen up to a dozen such cases a day,” per NPR.

Have asymptomatic carriers seeded a second outbreak that the government is scrambling to hide? Bear in mind, according to officials in Europe, some Chinese diagnostic tests are garbage. Even if Beijing wanted to be forthcoming about the extent of the epidemic, their own tests may have left them partially blind as to who’s sick and who isn’t.

One photo published by Caixin shows a truck loaded with 2,500 urns arriving at the Hankou Mortuary. The driver said that he had delivered the same amount to the mortuary the day before.

Another photo shows stacks of urns inside the mortuary. There were seven stacks with 500 urns in each stack, adding up to 3,500 urns.

Taken together with the new shipment, the number of urns on hand at the mortuary looks to be more than double Wuhan’s death toll…

Wuhan has seven other mortuaries. If they are all sticking to the same schedule, this adds up to more than 40,000 urns being distributed in the city over the next 10 days.

There are photos at the link. Reportedly people had to wait in line for hours to receive one, so great was the number. There are innocent possibilities for the shipment: Maybe Chinese cities are supplied with enough urns to last several months, encompassing all causes of death, even in normal times. There are also less innocent possibilities, of course. Were so many urns needed because the actual death toll in Wuhan in the first wave was much higher than the regime let on?

Or are so many urns needed because they’re afraid of how high the death toll might be in the second wave?

There were 56,007 cremations in Wuhan in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to data from the city’s civil affairs agency. The number of cremations was 1,583 higher than those in the fourth quarter of 2018 and 2,231 higher than the fourth quarter of 2017.

The official death toll in Wuhan from COVID-19 is 2,535. China didn’t lock down the area until late January of this year. If the height of the epidemic there didn’t come until 2020, how do we explain that unusual bump in deaths in the fourth quarter of last year — a number that would amount to more than half of the total number of deaths there from coronavirus to date?

Read this piece to see why China is so invested in its “zero” campaign. The numbers in Wuhan are a double-barreled propaganda opportunity to win a great-power competition with the U.S. Eradicating the disease domestically will be used first as proof that China’s authoritarian model is superior to the west’s in rising to great challenges and second as evidence that the virus’s spread abroad isn’t China’s fault, notwithstanding the early cover-up in Wuhan that allowed the disease to spread. If America is brought to its knees by an epidemic, well, maybe that has less to do with the severity of the illness than the weakness of America’s response. That’s the Chinese message, and why they can’t afford the world to know about a resurgence in Wuhan.

“The suddenness with which this has happened is also stunning. The globalists who excoriated Trump as a racist xenophobe might have to face the fact that events have been proving him right: we do need to make America great again. It’s not academic, it’s not just a campaign slogan. It’s a reality staring us in the face.”

It won’t be easy or painless, but the role China has played in exacerbating the fallout from the coronavirus crisis ought to force Americans to fundamentally reconsider the relationship.

I flew back from Washington DC to Munich just a day before the travel embargo from the Schengen zone to the United States came into effect. As I watched anxious gate agents, tense flight attendants, and passengers eyeing each other with suspicion, I could not help but think that what I was witnessing was the beginning of a radical recompilation of the mistaken notions that for the past three decades have shaped U.S. and European economic policy, and indirectly, international security. The idea that the People’s Republic of China can become a responsible stakeholder in the international community—that it can “be like us”—is being laid to rest behind the masked faces of petrified Westerners scurrying through airports to get home.

Amidst the 24/7 breathless media coverage and calls for politicians to “do something,” one fundamental question still needs to be addressed forthrightly and in the open: Who did this to us and what to do to prevent it from happening again?

The question about assigning agency and blame is pretty straightforward to answer: The communist Chinese state, which for more than three decades has been draining capital and knowledge from the West, benefiting from our greed and myopia, has just let loose a virus that in the coming months is about to effectively paralyze Europe and the United States and bring severe pain, both human and economic on the world. The “eruption at a wet market” explanation for the virus has to be questioned until we know the full story, if for no other reason than the fact that Beijing suppressed data for two months when the coronavirus first appeared, and even to this day refuses to come clean as to exactly what happened. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now spinning propaganda stories that both seek to somehow pin the blame on the United States, and that try to frame their bungling, denial-ridden, heavy-handed reaction as some kind of model for the world.

As a result of all this, the West is now shutting down, at least for a while. The ultimate cost to the world, in terms of new government debt, failed businesses, and human lives and suffering, is difficult to quantify at this point. But there are indications that the fallout from the Wuhan Virus could be transformative.

We must acknowledge our own complicity in what is now unfolding. The belief that globalization, through the radical centralization of market networks, was the unavoidable path forward has been exposed as a grave, near-delusional miscalculation. The offshoring by corporations of supply chains to China has not only eviscerated communities that were previously reliant on manufacturing jobs, but has also brought with it an unprecedented level of vulnerability and fragility to our economies. The populist revolts that have wracked Western democracies for the past several years are in part rooted in the pain that these dislocations have caused. Worse yet, for the past three decades, this offshoring process has favored an adversary that is determined to replace us as the hub of global economic and military power and place itself at the new normative center of the world.

Should the fallout from the Wuhan Virus prove to be as damaging as it looks like it might be, the first casualty should be China’s quest to become the premier manufacturing center for the world. Few corporations will want to again risk being caught in a situation where their entire supply chain has been locked into one country—much less a palpably hostile dictatorship.The subsequent era will, I hope, be one of strategic reconsolidation, with a special focus on onshoring critical supply chains that have been moved to China. Even the siren song of potentially-vast consumer markets in China may end up being more than offset by the trauma we are about to face.

As the dust settles, the United States should be taking a hard look at streamlining our federal and state regulatory framework, tax structure, and all other outstanding obstacles in order to encourage U.S. businesses to come back home. If, once this crisis is over, we do not have at least a blueprint for rebuilding America’s manufacturing base and restoring our ability to provide critical supplies to the country regardless of the actions of our adversary, a decisive opportunity will have been squandered. Such a plan ought to be accompanied by other measures, including ending China’s unfettered access to our research centers and universities, putting restrictions on technology exports to, and manufacturing in, China going forward, and using the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) more aggressively to prevent Chinese takeover of key industries and corporations.

The status quo ante should have never been an option for a free people to accept.

All the yammering about calling this bug the Chinese Virus, Wuhan Flu & Kung Flu are nothing but ‘we’re against anything Trump’ yammering of those who still haven’t come to terms with the fact that Hillary lost.

Want to know why the U.S. economy is in free fall? Why restaurants and bars are closing, putting millions out of work, and why the airline industry is facing possible bankruptcy? Why schools across the nation are shutting down, leaving students to fall behind and parents without safe places to send their children everyday? Why the stock market is plummeting, wiping out the retirement and college savings of millions of Americans? Why the elderly are isolated in nursing homes and tens of millions who don’t have the option of teleworking have no idea how they will pay their bills?

Answer: Because China is a brutal totalitarian dictatorship.

More coverage of the coronavirus pandemic

We are in the midst of a pandemic lockdown today because the Chinese Communist regime cared more about suppressing information than suppressing a virus. Doctors in Wuhan knew in December that the coronavirus was capable of human-to-human transmission because medical workers were getting sick. But as late as Jan. 15, the head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention declared on state television that “the risk of human-to-human transmission is low.” On Jan. 18, weeks after President Xi Jinping had taken charge of the response, authorities allowed a Lunar New Year banquet to go forward in Wuhan where tens of thousands of families shared food — and then let millions travel out of Wuhan, allowing the disease to spread across the world. It was not until Jan. 23 that the Chinese government enacted a quarantine in Wuhan.

If the regime had taken action as soon as human-to-human transmission was detected, it might have contained the virus and prevented a global pandemic. Instead, Chinese officials punished doctors for trying to warn the public and suppressed information that might have saved lives. According to the Times of London, Chinese doctors who had identified the pathogen in early December received a gag order from China’s National Health Commission with instructions to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news.

This is what totalitarian regimes do. First, they lie to themselves, and then, they lie to the world. The system creates such fear that people are terrified to report bad news up the chain, causing “authoritarian blindness.” Then, when those at the top finally discover the truth, they try to cover it up — because leaders who abuse their people are less concerned with saving lives than making sure the world does not discover the deadly inefficiency of their system.

The ongoing pandemic should serve as a reminder of the lesson that President George W. Bush tried to teach us after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks: What happens thousands of miles away in a foreign land can affect us here at home. Both viruses and virulent ideologies fester in the fever swamps of totalitarianism and then emerge to kill us in our cities and our streets. Two decades ago, it was a terrorist attack; today, it is a once-in-a-generation pathogen. But in both cases, the lack of freedom in a distant land created conditions that allowed an unprecedented threat to grow, bringing death and destruction to our country.

What Bush called the “freedom agenda” is out of vogue today. But we can now see that caring about freedom is putting America first, because how China treats its people affects the health and security of the American people. The same totalitarian system that lied about putting 1 million Uighurs in concentration camps lied about the outbreak of this virus, creating a global pandemic. If China were an open and transparent society, with an accountable government, Americans might not be on lockdown today.

The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.

What can we do about it? We obviously can’t turn China into a democracy. But we can hold China accountable for its behavior and put a price on its lies and oppression. We can reaffirm that the advance of freedom, transparency and rule of law are central objectives of U.S. foreign policy, because the lives and safety of our citizens depend on it. And we can lay the blame for this crisis where it belongs: at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party. Once the crisis has passed, President Trump should calculate the damage and demand that Beijing pay for the death and destruction it unleashed on the United States and the world.

Some have suggested that calling this pathogen the “Wuhan virus” — or as President Trump recently called it, the “Chinese virus” — is racist. That is absurd. MERS is called the “Middle East Respiratory Syndrome” because that is where it originated. Moreover, the Chinese regime continues to lie, spreading a conspiracy theory that the source of the virus is really the U.S. Army.

It is important this virus be forever linked to the brutal regime that facilitated its spread. The virus grew in the cesspool of Chinese Communist tyranny. It’s time to drain the swamp.

Before MSNBC personalities were calling it “racist” and “astoundingly gross” to note the origin of the new coronavirus, NBC News reported in January on what it called the “Wuhan coronavirus.”

In recent days, the Chinese government has sought to cast doubt on whether the virus in fact originated in the city of Wuhan after initially acknowledging that the disease emerged from Wuhan, known as “South China Seafood City.” ………..

1. What Chinese Officials Have Said in Denial

“Some in the media say this coronavirus is a China virus. This is extremely irresponsible and we firmly oppose that,” Zhao Lijian, spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said March 4. “We are still tracing the origin of the virus and there is no conclusion yet.”

More than just dodging responsibility, the Chinese government reportedly has pushed propaganda that the United States started the virus.

“In recent days, run-of-the-mill mockery of the White House has taken a darker turn as the Chinese internet became inundated by the theory, subtly stoked by the Chinese government, that the coronavirus originated in the United States,” the newspaper said. “The U.S. government, one version of the theory goes, has been covering up mounting cases, and perhaps thousands of deaths, by classifying them as regular flu.”

There have been false internet rumors in the United States about China as well, but there is a clear difference, said Dean Cheng, senior research fellow for Asian studies at The Heritage Foundation.

“The problem here is that this seems to be echoes of Soviet information warfare,” Cheng told The Daily Signal. “America has a free press, from CNN to Alex Jones, The New York Times, and the National Enquirer. China’s press is state run. So these rumors are not random charges.”

The goal of the Chinese government is to define the virus as being as distant from government leaders and the Communist Party as possible, Cheng said.